{"id":600402,"date":"2026-04-11T16:44:27","date_gmt":"2026-04-11T16:44:27","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/600402\/"},"modified":"2026-04-11T16:44:27","modified_gmt":"2026-04-11T16:44:27","slug":"artemis-ii-and-the-invisible-hazard-on-the-way-to-the-moon-part-1","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/600402\/","title":{"rendered":"Artemis II and the invisible hazard on the way to the Moon (Part 1)"},"content":{"rendered":"

The most important data from NASA\u2019s first crewed Artemis II<\/a> mission may not be its photographs, but the radiation measurements that will shape how humans\u00a0work and survive\u00a0beyond\u00a0travel farther from\u00a0Earth\u2019s magnetic shelter\u00a0safely.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Artemis II science operations<\/a>\u00a0will lay the foundation for safe and efficient human exploration of the Moon and Mars.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The investigations will encompass human health, lunar science, CubeSats, Science Operations and Space weather.\u00a0<\/p>\n

\u00a0<\/p>\n

One of ANSTO’s radiation dosimetry experts, Dr Mitra Safavi Naeini (pictured left) explored the approach undertaken by NASA.\u00a0<\/p>\n

When NASA launched Artemis II on 1 April 2026, sending Reid Wiseman, Victor Glover, Christina\u00a0Koch\u00a0and Jeremy Hansen on a 10-day lunar flyby, it sent humans beyond low Earth orbit and back into the deep-space radiation environment for the first time since the Apollo program.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Radiation is one of the mission\u2019s core scientific and operational questions.\u00a0Along with four astronauts went cabin monitors, crew-worn dosimeters, an upgraded German heavy-ion detector, organ chits, saliva and\u00a0blood sampling, and performance studies.\u00a0The flight is testing the Orion and the Space Launch System with a crew aboard, but it is also characterising the radiation field inside the spacecraft, measuring how that\u00a0environment\u00a0field\u00a0changes with trajectory and shielding, and linking those physical measurements to biomarkers, performance\u00a0data\u00a0and biological experiments.\u00a0<\/p>\n

The radiation environment\u00a0<\/p>\n

The first thing to get right is that ‘radiation level’ is not a single number. Beyond Earth orbit, astronauts face three overlapping hazards: trapped particles in the Van Allen belts, solar particle events from the Sun, and galactic cosmic rays from outside the solar system. The belts are intense but brief\u2014the spacecraft crosses them quickly. Solar particle events are intermittent and operationally urgent; they can raise dose rates sharply over hours. Galactic cosmic rays are the chronic background: a low-dose-rate field of very high-energy particles, mostly protons but also heavy ions, present all the time and notoriously difficult to shield against.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Radiation science in space is hard because none of this reduces to a single number. Raw absorbed dose is only the beginning. A\u00a0gray\u00a0tells you how much energy is deposited, now how much biological trouble that energy will cause.\u00a0There are more than fifty shades of\u00a0gray\u00a0(Gy) in space. Dose rate matters. Particle type matters. Direction matters. Shielding matters.\u00a0Artemis II is flying in the unsettled aftermath of Solar Cycle 25\u2019s maximum, which creates a useful paradox: the chronic galactic cosmic ray background is\u00a0somewhat lower\u00a0around solar maximum, but the chance of a disruptive solar storm is higher.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

A proton storm and a background field of heavy ions are\u00a0therefore\u00a0biologically different problems, even if a headline number makes them look comparable. Radiation teams\u00a0therefore\u00a0care about\u00a0quantities related to\u00a0radiation quality,\u00a0including quantities\u00a0such as linear energy transfer, because densely ionising particles do more biological damage than the same absorbed dose delivered by sparsely ionising radiation.\u00a0<\/p>\n

Shielding adds another layer\u00a0of complexity. For solar proton events, extra material helps\u00a0a considerably. For galactic cosmic rays, the\u00a0benefit\u00a0becomes more counterintuitive: it is much smaller\u00a0when very energetic ions hit spacecraft wall\u2014or body itself\u2014they can fragment and generate secondary radiation, including neutrons\u2014and interactions in shielding generate secondary particles that complicate the picture further.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Artemis I already\u00a0demonstrated\u00a0why that nuance matters. The uncrewed mission found that Orion\u2019s shielding was effective for a lunar flight, but exposure varied by location within the cabin and by spacecraft\u00a0orientation. During one passage through the radiation belts, a change in orientation during an engine burn reduced measured radiation levels by\u00a0nearly half.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

Radiation protection in deep space is\u00a0therefore\u00a0partly a materials problem, but it is also a geometry and operations problem\u2014and Artemis II is the first mission to map this geometry with crew on board. Orion carries six Hybrid Electronic Radiation Assessors,\u00a0active\u00a0crew\u00a0dosimeters\u00a0worn by the astronauts, and updated M-42 EXT detectors from the German Aerospace Centre\u00a0with much finer energy resolution than Artemis I version. Together they provide time-resolved measurements of the environment where the crew\u00a0actually live\u00a0and work.<\/p>\n

If the Sun produces a significant solar particle event during the mission, they help Mission Control decide when the crew should shelter and where\u00a0inside\u00a0Orion is safest.\u00a0In\u00a0practice, that can mean\u00a0decisions about turning response: whether to change activity, how to use available\u00a0stowage and water\u00a0as\u00a0a makeshift storm shelter inside the vehicle, additional shielding, and where the best-protected volume inside Orion really is.\u00a0<\/p>\n

For living systems, Artemis II goes beyond counting particles. The\u00a0AVATAR experiment<\/a>\u00a0is flying bone-marrow-derived organ chips (see image above) made from\u00a0each the\u00a0astronaut\u2019s\u2019\u00a0own cells inside a self-contained payload. Bone marrow is a logical target because it is central to immune function and\u00a0particularly sensitive to radiation.\u00a0\u00a0<\/p>\n

NASA is also collecting immune biomarkers through saliva and blood sampling, while\u00a0ARCHeR<\/a>\u00a0and Standard Measures track sleep, stress, cognition,\u00a0performance\u00a0and other physiological responses.\u00a0One of most interesting questions is whether the same physical dose\u00a0field translates into the same biological injury in different people.\u00a0Radiation never acts in isolation. On a real mission it is layered with microgravity, confinement, altered sleep, workload, heat, carbon dioxide, and distance from Earth.\u00a0<\/p>\n

In Part 2: L<\/a>earn what one moon flyby can and cannot do and what is next \u00a0<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"The most important data from NASA\u2019s first crewed Artemis II mission may not be its photographs, but the…\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":600403,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[23],"tags":[64,63,128,285],"class_list":["post-600402","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-space","tag-au","tag-australia","tag-science","tag-space"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600402","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=600402"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/600402\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/600403"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=600402"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=600402"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/au\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=600402"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}